Bill Peterson was my earliest mentor in economics and it was he who introduced me to Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek. He also was very instrumental in my turning my career toward teaching economics, and I owe him much.

In 2004, I wrote this about him:

I first met Bill Peterson in 1981. I was working in Athens, Tennessee, and Bill held the Scott L. Probasco Chair of Free Enterprise at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. To help begin the economic education of an economically illiterate person, Bill gave me copies of some of his work, as well as the January 1981 edition of The Freeman. That was only the beginning. Soon, I was to find out that he wrote his doctoral dissertation at NYU under Mises. Now, I had heard about Milton Friedman and had religiously read Free to Choose, but my economic education had a long way (and still does) to go.

To make a long story short, Bill put a lot of time and energy into helping me learn the basics of economics. In the spring of 1982, I won the Olive W. Garvey Economic Essay Contest and presented my paper at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting that year in what was then West Berlin. From there, I continued to learn, and Bill was never far away.

By 1982, he was forcefully urging me to go into a doctoral program in economics, and while I would have liked to have done it then, family and work circumstances intervened and kept me from achieving that goal, at least for nearly two decades. Bill was relentless and he never gave up on his student; in 1999, I finally received the requisite signatures on my dissertation and had my “union card” (as he affectionately called the doctorate).

But Bill Peterson did not simply teach me economics; he also was one of the first people to sow the anti-war seeds in my mind. Now, he was not (and is not) a pacifist, but he was the first person I knew who openly questioned the U.S. role both in World War I and World War II. It had never occurred to me before that U.S. entry into these conflicts was anything but inevitable — and morally justified.

Even today, I always am pleased to hear from him via email or some other form of communications. Furthermore, the teacher himself is still a student of the discipline, and he has never stopped his quest for economic knowledge. Mises, indeed, would be proud of his student.